By MICHAEL GARTLAND
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS 

“[Trump] was running around saying the auto industry was building more plants and creating more jobs,” said Sharon Block, director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “This would suggest, again, that he wasn’t being truthful with the American people.”

By Sabri Ben-Achour and Daniel Shin
Marketplace

Tuesday's U.S. Supreme Court decision to rule in favor of Mark Janus in the Janus v. AFSCME case effectively changed the entire way public unions raise funds for their collective bargaining services. The ruling now bars unions from collecting fees from non-union members with the court citing this now defunct fee requirement as a violation of free speech.

The conclusion of the Janus v. AFSCME case brings a major disruptive change to how public sector unions would potentially operate, so what will these unions do next?

Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School for some insight.... Read more about What does the Supreme Court's Janus ruling mean for unions? It would be like the government no longer enforcing taxes

The Labour Rights Indicators are based on coding the findings of selected nine sources and compiling this information in a readily accessible and concise manner. It is designed to be used both by practitioners and researchers. It builds on five basic elements: the premises of definitional validity, reproducibility and transparency; the 108 violation type used to code violations in law and practice; the textual sources selected for coding; the general and source-specific coding rules; and the rules to convert the coded information into normalized indicators. The country...

Josh Eidelson, Dana Hull
Bloomberg

Language in a confidential severance agreement Tesla Inc. is using as part of the biggest job cut in its history is likely to deter dismissed employees from going public with worker safety concerns, according to employment-law experts.

“The implication is, if you went to OSHA and you said, ‘Here’s something new I want to tell you about a safety concern at Tesla,’ and then OSHA asks the company to respond to that allegation, the company is going to say, ‘That employee told us that they raised everything,’” said Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program.

Representation
Sharon Block is interviewed by Suzanne Cummings
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Understanding the vital importance of strength in numbers to rights and representation, labor unions have served as the central outlet for worker voice in the United States since the New Deal Era. For generations, unions sought to protect and advance workers' right to a safe and fair work environment. While some union organizations remain strong and active today, overall union membership has dropped in the U.S. over the past few decades even as recent surveys show interest growing among nonunion workers in joining unions. Our opening section in this issue on worker voice digs into the reasons for and results of these changing dynamics, and explores how unions are evolving and building new connections within a radically different economy today.

"Union density in this country is now lower than it was before workers had a protected right to join unions. That says to me that there’s something pretty fundamental not working in our law." Sharon Block... Read more about Series One: Many Roads to Quality Work • Issue Two: Amplifying Workers’ Voices in an Evolving Economy - Invested

By Bill Knight / Opinion columnist
Pekin Daily Times

A U.S. Supreme Court majority on May 21 unleashed employers to run roughshod over labor law, ruling 5-4 that employers can prohibit their workers from banding together in disputes over pay and other workplace disputes. The Court’s five-justice conservative bloc said employers may require employees, as a condition of employment, to give up any joint legal remedy despite of the guarantee of New Deal laws stating that workers have a right to unionize or “engage in other concerted activities for the purposes...